A rookie kindergarten teacher, Tsuchida, runs into one of his new pupils before the beginning of the term, and she very rapidly decides that they should be married; this is Hanamaru Kindergarten. You certainly can't complain that the plot is convoluted.

The thing that trips me up about Anzu and Tsuchida's relationship is that technically, it's not pedophilia, yet it somehow makes you think about the ramifications of falling in love with children. It's not pedophilia because Tsuchida himself is not a pedophile- it's made obvious in the first episode that his only sexual interests concern adult women (or at the very least, post-pubescent women). It's the five year-old Anzu who's the aggressor in the relationship, and while she's certainly precocious, it's not that uncommon for kids to start talking about marriage once they find out what it is. If you only take the basics into accounts, it sounds pretty normal.

However, when you look at their relationship in light of other developments on the show- even from the very beginning- things very rapidly start getting disturbing. While Tsuchida doesn't have inappropriate feelings for Anzu as a child, he's clearly still carrying a torch for Anzu's mother, Sakura- whom Anzu resembles greatly. Sakura herself points out that, in a decade or so, Anzu will be of marriageable age, and a romantic relationship between the two at that point would not be anything out of the ordinary.

If Anzu is going to grow up into basically a clone of Sakura (which the show has already implied), Tsuchida knows that in all likelihood, he will be attracted to her in not that long. Even if he has no tendency towards pedophilia whatsoever, the situation with Anzu means that he associates her on some level with sex, only in the future. Does that association alone make him tainted in some way, even if it's not his fault? Would it indeed be okay if they started going out when she's 18, and he a more confident 30-something? Or would the very fact that he was close to her as a child make that relationship wrong? Would falling in love with the adult Anzu, while otherwise non-objectionable, make him a retroactive pedophile?

The thing I find particularly interesting is that all of these concerns are relatively recent- for a long time, a five-year-old being betrothed to a twenty-year-old was a staple of the upperclass in many different cultures throughout the world. Childhood itself is arguably a recent invention- way back when, people went immediately from infants to marriage prospects; there was no intermediary "hands-off" period. That doesn't mean that everyone back then was actually a pedophile, but it was considered okay to pick your spouse as a child, and watch them develop until they hit the age for monkey business. When Sakura gives her blessing to Anzu and Tsuchida's "betrothal", it seems to us like she's crazy, but in reality, the history of humanity is on her side.

On a more superficial level, I know the jury is out on whether the character designs in Hanamaru Kindergarten are adorable or creepy, but count me in the adorable camp- their absolutely minuscule hands and feet get me all the time. If you want a dose of cuteness, you can hardly do better than this show, although the darling kids don't have a helluva lot to do; so far, the only interesting plot has involved the, ahem, love triangle. This is show is in real danger of getting boring if it doesn't start developing the main character relationships very quickly.

I almost can't believe that this show is going to do anything significant with the themes I've talked about here, because the results would be too outrageous (or subversive, depending on how you look at it) for a show that trades in cuteness. The only reason I put the "almost" in there is because Gainax cannot be trusted not to go absolutely batshit insane by about episode 5. If nothing else, this show is like crack for the part of me that likes saying "Aaawwwww!", but whether it will be more than that- and by how much- is totally up in the air at this point.

Damn, between this and Chu-Bra! I can't decide if the anime this season are heroically genre-shattering, or just plain fucked up. I should watch some more Ladies vs. Butlers and console myself with the simplicity of completely unequivocal hatred.